Morning Links: Island of Porquerolles Edition

The board of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston has decided to extend its offer of $10 million for information that results in the return of the 13 works there were purloined from its building in 1990, in a theft that is considered “the world’s largest unsolved art heist,” according to the New York Times. The reward had been scheduled to drop back down to $5 million at the start of this year. [The New York Times]

Museum News and Policy

The Denver Art Museum broke ground on a renovation program that will rehab its famed Gio Ponti–designed building, Westword reports. The project is expected to take about three years. [Westword]

The Shanghai region has a new museum, the Art Newspaper reports: a branch of the Baolong Art Museum in the Qibao area that is funded by the collector Xu Jiankang and his Baolong Group. It focuses on 19th- and 20th-century Chinese ink art. [The Art Newspaper]

And the island of Porquerolles, which is near St. Tropez, is getting a sculpture garden and exhibition space, thanks to collector Edouard Carmignac, according to the Art Newspaper. [The Art Newspaper]

A hot take: Michael O’Hare, a professor of public policy at the Goldman School at UC Berkeley, argues in the San Francisco Chronicle that museums should sell work they keep in storage to enable free admission. [San Francisco Chronicle]

RIP

Los Angeles dealer Jan Baum, whose artists included Chris Burden and Betye Saar, has died at the age of 89, the Los Angeles Times reports. “Jan Baum was very good because she was art for art’s sake,” the artist and writer Peter Plagens, who showed with Baum, told Carolina Miranda in the paper. “She didn’t care that much about selling. Obviously she sold because it was a business. But she wasn’t about pushing.” [The Los Angeles Times]

The Talent

The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles has hired Scott Tennent as its chief communications officer. Tennent’s coming from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where he is currently director of advancement communications.

And Tera Hedrick has been named curator of the Wichita Art Museum, Artforum notes, citing the Wichita Eagle. She had been serving as interim curator for the past seven months. [Artforum / Wichita Eagle]

Elsewhere

In the unlikely event that you missed it: The Washington Post reported that President Trump wondered aloud in a meeting yesterday, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” The remark has been widely condemned. [The Washington Post]

The New York Times ran with the story as well, printing, for the very first time, the expletive used by the president. A Twitter account called New New York Times monitors the first usage of words in the paper. Other terms making debut appearances recently: “nonforwardable,” “crevicelike,” and “noncardio.” [@NYT_first_said/Twitter]